The World's Average Download Speed Is 580Kbps

That figure comes courtesy of a Global Download Report published by the global game-delivery company Pando Networks. The study, which was conducted from January 1 through June 30, 2011, tracked the download speeds of 21 million gamers around the world. Most of the gamers Pando works with are in the MMO/Free-To-Play realm, playing games like League of Legends and Lord of the Rings Online.

Salient findings are listed in a handy infographic at the end of this post, including the fact that the United States doesn't even crack the top 15 fastest countries in the world (though way to go Andover, Massachusetts, for being one of only two of the top 12 fastest cities not located in South Korea)! Verizon is our fastest internet provider, followed by Comcast. AT&T is quite a ways down the list.

Virgin Media rules Great Britain, and Dacom Corp is king in South Korea. South Korea's sixth-fastest download service is almost three times faster than the United States' fastest. Dang.

I should note that Pando sent these numbers with no third-party corroboration; we're taking them at their word on the soundness of the study and its findings. A representative from Pando told me that the users on their network might be a touch faster than average due to their high use of peer-to-peer file sharing.

The infographic below breaks the whole study down (larger version here).

No, you don't. This is megabytes/second, you're quoting your theoretical megabits/second. So in reality the best you can ever get is around 1 megabyte/second, and the only place you will ever get that is sites like Microsoft or Apple, or a really really well seeded torrent...

Also, you're paying for ADSL2+ which makes not claim that you will achieve 20mbps, let alone 20MBps.
You get what your line and hardware can provide. In fact, if you compare what you're paying for your internet access to what many Americans are shelling out for Comcast, you're in a fairly good position.

It says 580 Kilobits per second, not 580 kilobytes per second. Since 10 megabits per second will net you roughly 1.0 megabytes per second download speed, 580 kilobits would net you around 50 kilobytes per second download speed. That's terrible.